Client Journey: Kylie & Marc

Owen Valley, near Murchison — the Whio, 14x4

Thirteen hectares of hillside forestry, two roads they cut themselves, and a question about insurance that decided the whole thing.

Who Kylie and Marc are

Kylie first emailed us in August 2024 with one line: when is the next viewing, specifically of the Whio 14x4?

Then nothing for seven months. That is not unusual and it is not a bad sign. People go away and think.

She came back in March 2025 with a different question — what does a shell cost, and what does a very basic lined version with a kitchen cost — for a 14 by 4 delivered to Owen Valley, near Murchison.

They own around thirteen hectares of forestry block on a hillside. They had already put two roads into it themselves and identified two potential house sites. This was not a couple looking for a lifestyle change. They had land, they had done the earthworks, and they were working out the cheapest honest way to put a dwelling on it.

What they decided

The thing that shaped the decision was insurance.

They had been told that a pine block will not be insured until the trees are at least ten years old, and they were not prepared to put a dwelling up there with no cover on it. Their thinking was that a tiny home on a trailer — insurable as a vehicle rather than as a building on a forestry block — might be the way through.

That is a genuinely clever piece of problem solving, and it is not one we had heard put that way before. We are not insurance advisers and we said so, but we could tell them we had placed homes on working land before and put them in front of the right questions to ask a broker.

They also worked through the practical list: standing height in the upstairs bedrooms, rainwater catchment across several tanks, solar, sewer to come later, and — the one everybody forgets — whether a truck could actually get a 14 by 4 metre home up their own driveway. Kylie sent Fran video of the access. She could not get it to send by email, so it went by phone.

Between March and April they moved from a bare shell to a full Whio on a trailer. They signed on 22 April 2025 with one firm condition: on site by mid-August.

The build

Their Whio — internally W02, the second of that series — was built through winter 2025. Kylie and Marc are not effusive people by email, and their replies to the weekly photos are some of our favourites for that reason.

"Looks good thank you"

"Yes happy with that looks great"

Two people who knew exactly what they had ordered, getting exactly what they had ordered.

Behind the scenes there was more going on. They went to Tasman District Council themselves about resource consent for the placement. We ran the delivery quoting for a 14 by 4 into a rural valley, which is not a simple job. And they carried on preparing a site most builders would have taken one look at and declined to deliver to.

Where it is at

Their home is up on the block, in the trees, with the rainwater tanks and the solar they planned from the start.

We have since asked whether we can borrow it for a professional photo shoot, because a single-storey home sitting in position on real land — this land in particular — photographs like nothing we can stage in a yard.

What this taught Ruru

The reason a client chooses a tiny home is often not the reason we assume.

We spend a lot of time talking about affordability, flexibility and downsizing. Kylie and Marc chose one because of an insurance problem on a young forestry block. Nobody at Ruru would have predicted that, and if we had led with our usual pitch we would have been answering a question they were not asking.

So we ask now. What is actually driving this? The answer is frequently something we have never heard before, and it changes what we should be recommending.

The second lesson is smaller and more physical. Get video of the driveway early. A 14 by 4 metre home is a serious piece of transport, and the time to find out whether it can reach the site is before it is built, not after.

Got difficult land — steep, forested, off-grid, no services? That is a conversation worth having early. Send us video of the access.